Her the Heron, Hurried Away
Love is noticing.
“You look like a movie. You sound like a song. My God, this reminds me. Of when we were young.” - Adele
White Lotus. 5 episodes in. So good. What a soundtrack. Who is in the coffin getting loaded on to the plane in the first scene? Why did the birth scene happen at the beginning, and not get mentioned since?
Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?- Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Lotos-Eaters
In 2021, it’s rare for an app to make its way straight to the iPhone home screen. And even rarer that you sign up for a $150 annual subscription straight after first use. But that’s what I did with SwingVision.
SwingVision is Strava for tennis. Early backers include Andy Roddick, and Tennis Australia’s venture fund.
SwingVision lets you track your match, your shot data, and then watch the key moments back to gain insight on how you play. In the match I’ve gif’d above for example, I hit 30% slice forehands. As a tennis coach friend texted me when I shared that stat: “Crikey. Were you playing squash?”
If you want to try it, there’s one hurdle which is that you need something to mount your phone on. I use this $27 flexible tripod and it works well.
How different composers experience Gustav Mahler’s Symphony 2 Final Resurrection
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Symphonies
Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life
There was a night I carried my son to bed for the last time but I don’t remember it. I’m sure he was tired since he fell asleep on the couch. I lifted him up, placed him in his bed and kissed him goodnight. I would pay any amount of money to relive it.
The Big Bang: What We Know and How We Know It
The ‘untranslatable’ Japanese phrase that predicts love
A First-time Skydiving Experience, a Fall to Earth and a Terrible Accident
Luke Aikins No Parachute 25,000 Feet Airplane Jump Complete Video
“No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth."
- Wilbur Wright
I have been back down the rabbit hole on Bon Iver’s ‘Creeks’ lately. Deep diving in subreddits for lyrics interpretations, and making my way through every recording that exists on YouTube of the song being played live (I’ve found 74, not including the ones that appear within the full concert uploads). The album version does not come close to the live experience.
And love at second glance, it is not something that we'll need
Honey, understand that I have been left here in the reeds
But all I'm trying to do is get my feet out from the crease
On a view count basis, people seem to love the NPR version of Creeks (I think it’s too vanilla) and the Paris Philharmonie version (which charmingly starts with the Prismizer malfunctioning).
If you haven’t ever gone deep on the Prismizer, it’s quite fascinating, and not the same effect as used by Cher (autotune) or California Love (vocoder).
Related: This is Pop’s autotune episode was awesome.
If you’ve ever heard ‘Creeks’ live, you’ll know that the low end of the Prismizer makes it hard to breathe while Vernon’s singing. And that the silences that appear as seconds in these live videos feel like minutes when shared with thousands of other souls.
For a deep cut of Creeks ( just ~7k views), I like TD Garden, Boston from 2019.
It’s been a big few weeks of basketball.
Delly announced he’s coming home to Melbourne United. Josh Giddey got drafted at #6. Luc Longley finally told his side of the Last Dance story (Part 1, Part 2).
And, Giannis won his first title and gave us a mental model for the ages.
When you focus on the past, that's your ego.
But the highest high came from the Boomers’ bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Surely no bronze medal has ever brought more Australian sports fans to tears… at four Olympics, across four decades, the Boomers have played for a bronze medal and lost. We lost in the final seconds to Spain in Rio 2016, then to Spain again (in double overtime) in the 2019 World Champs.
If you were born in the 80s, and grew up through basketball’s early 90s golden era, the bronze medal was the culmination of a mountain of childhood memories - Shane Heal chest bumping Charles Barkley and hitting six threes as he stood up to the bully, Anstey, Bradtke, Gaze and Heal all dipping their toes into short-term NBA contracts, Luc Longley anchoring the GOAT Jordan Bulls squad, Andrew Bogut going #1 to the Bucks, the AIS kids coming of age (Bogut, Delly, Ingles, Mills), the St Mary’s wellspring, Bogut anchoring, and winning rings with the GOAT Warriors teams, Patty Mills’ winning rings with the Spurs as he dropped 3s on LeBron’s Heat, Delly going on a drip after chasing Steph Curry through endless NBA Finals screens (which I got to see live), Kyrie, Dante at #5, Ben Simmons at #1, the Boomers win over the Dreamteam at Marvel Stadium (which I got to see live), Matthise suddenly materialising, Patty tearfully carrying the flag for the team at Tokyo 2020, and then refusing to do anything but win in the bronze medal game, dropping and unfathomable 42 and 9 to beat a Luka-led Slovenian team…
As Ingles, and Exum dropped those threes late in the fourth quarter I jumped around the lounge room punching the air like a lunatic.
And then Andrew Gaze summed it up for all of us, linking his father Lindsay’s early efforts when there were 200 people in the whole country who played the game of basketball… to this moment of pure, generational elation. Bravo.
To be a good chef all you’ve got to do is lots of little things well.
Life at Blackbird has had lots of moments to (briefly) celebrate lately: Eucalyptus’ Series B (podcast deep-dive here), Culture Amp’s Series F, Dovetail’s Series A, Fable’s Heston burgers hitting the Grill’d menu, and the nura true wireless launch (I am listening to mine now).
We’re hiring a Head of Investor relations, and a Community Lead in Aotearoa if you’d like to join us.
And we’re making $1,000 grants to young, passionate Wild Hearts working on creative projects across Australia and New Zealand.
Related: On Medici, And Thiel - We should radically scale genius grants
How Dave Grohl’s drums on Nevermind were inspired by disco
I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts. I don’t seem to work consciously. I write to unburden myself, to amuse myself, to arrange in order the things that bulge in my head, to make myself notice things.
- Jerzy Kosinński
Very few podcast episodes still retain their essentialism beyond a few days after they are published. Irish poet John O'Donohue’s discussion with Krista Tippett from 2008 on The Inner Landscape of Beauty is different.
O'Donohue died unexpectedly in his sleep, at 52, shortly after this podcast was recorded.
The dawn goes up, and the twilight comes, even in the roughest inner-city place. And I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe. And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence, even through memory or imagination, can be brought inward as a sustaining thing.
It’s the question of beauty — as we are speaking, there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.
- John O'Donohue
Interesting as always, Nick. I hear you're looking for associates 😎.